Judith Butler's Phantasms

To the best of my discernment Tyler Cowen is a serious economist. Thanks to the Lord, I am not qualified to judge the seriousness of his thoughts about matters economical.

But, yesterday, Cowen opined about one Judith Butler, an intrepid proponent of gender dysphoria and a warrior against what she sees as the advent of worldwide fascism.

If the word crackpot means anything, Judith Butler qualifies. And yet, Cowen takes it all oh so seriously. On his Marginal Revolution blog he writes this:

And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think Butler is more right than wrong.  This is a very good book, and in some critical ways a very libertarian book (again to be clear I think Butler is wrong about most other things).  But on this issue — why so insist on such a rigid male-female set of binary categories?  Why be so afraid of alternative, more flexible approaches?  Why restrict our conceptual freedoms and ultimately our life practical freedoms in such a manner?  Especially when a minority of people — admittedly a small minority but also much larger than the mere category of “trans” — will suffer greatly from such attitudes and such practices?

Of course, all human societies, from the dawn of time, have insisted on binary categories. Has Cowen ever heard of Claude Levi-Strauss’s book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship?

Serious thinkers do not take Judith Butler seriously. She is a symptom of the degeneration of academic thinking in America.

Katha Pollitt in The Atlantic and Andrew Sullivan on his Substack take her apart without working up a sweat.

As Katha Pollitt points out, Butler’s enemy is vast indeed. She is at war against fascism, which she imagines, in her phantasms, to be a clear and present danger.

It is worth paying some attention to this war against fascism, against Hitler and his Nazis, against the radical and non-so-radical right, against the capitalist patriarchy. For someone like Butler, who has never learned to think, these are all the same.

Now, it is worth noting, even if just in passing, that, once upon a time, the European continent was awash in outright fascists and Nazis. For most of the time that fascists did their dirty deeds in that place, the American political leadership, beginning with the great Franklin Roosevelt, basically did nothing.

Intrepid fascist fighters that liberal Democrats are, their great hero sat on his hands for eight years of European fascism, to say nothing of Hitler. As it happens, the liberal intelligentsia has not lived down this dereliction.

And one ought to mention, if only in passing, that the track record of the extreme political left was nothing to admire or extol. After all, Communism produced over 100 millions corpses, most of whom died of starvation. See The Black Book of Communism. 

And let’s not ignore the fact that Nazism was a shorthand for National Socialism. If you think that radical socialism is going to save us, think again. If you believe that fascism is the sum of all evils, what’s left for communism.

Katha Pollitt finds something disquieting in Butler’s constant harping on the dangers of fascism:

Fascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet. As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own. That definition is so broad and so vague as to be useless. You might even say that “fascism” functions as a kind of phantasm, frightening people into accepting views wholesale without examining them individually. It’s a kind of guilt by association—like comparing critics of your prose to Nixon.

Evidently, we are not dealing with serious thinking. Butler seems to like to keep trotting out the word “phantasm” which means something like phantom.

When you have taken your leave from reality you are left with phantoms, fictional beings that defy reality.

Then Pollitt makes a salient point, one that other commentators seem to have ignored. If gender is a social construction, why would we not believe that transgender identities are socially constructed. 

It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want. Butler seems to suggest that being trans is being your authentic self, but what is authenticity? In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.

And then there is Andrew Sullivan, who takes Judith Butler to school and has the good sense not to use her illiterate pronouns. Apparently, Butler systematically denies realities that do not conform to her mindless beliefs:

For Butler, in matters of sex and the body, nothing is as it appears, the individual has no independent existence or capacity for reason outside social and cultural forces, and even the basics of anatomy, like a penis, are just socially constructed all the way down. There is no independent, stable variable like nature or biology or evolution that can help us understand our bodies, and our sex. Everything is in our heads, and our heads are entirely created by others in the past and present:

He continues:

This is Blank Slatism in its ultimate form, a denial of any independent biological influence on human nature or behavior. The fact that we are a species of mammal, organized around a binary reproductive strategy for millions of years, in which we are divided almost exactly into male and female, and in which there are only two types of gametes, eggs and sperm — and no “speggs” — is, for Butler, irrelevant. It is not even a fact. The sex binary is, rather, a human invention — specifically, a product of American “white supremacy.”

Blaming it on white supremacy is just plain stupid. Sullivan corrects Butler:

 But of all the things you could call “socially constructed,” the sex binary is the least plausible. It existed in our species before we even achieved the intelligence to call it a sex binary. It existed before humans even evolved into the separate and mostly distinct genetic clusters we now call race. How’s that for pre-cultural! It is in countless species that have no access to an array of “practices, discourses, and technologies.” It structures our entire existence. Not a single cell in the body is unaffected by our sex. Our entire reproductive strategy as a mammal is rooted in it. If you can turn even this into a human invention — malleable and indeterminate and a “spectrum” — there is nothing real outside us at all.

So, down with Judith Butler. Cease relying on phantasms. Up with reality.

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The War in Gaza Today

Fair is fair. I have never hesitated to offer sage and sound criticism of positions taken by the New York Times columnist David Brooks. At times it has felt like shooting fish in a barrel. I have never been very impressed by Brooks.

Yet, when Brooks offers us a sane and sensible column about an important topic, we should acknowledge the fact. In a recent column about the situation in Israel and Gaza Brooks made an intelligent suggestion. His idea, namely, was that those who are whining about the Israeli military approach are obliged to propose a better way. As of now, they have not.

At the risk of being repetitious, the simple fact that those who oppose the Israeli military action do not really have a better way identifies them as chronic whiners. One understands that the Biden administration is being run by a chorus of chronic whiners, but you knew that. Heck, even James Carville knows that. He recently said that the Democratic Party is suffering from a surplus of “preachy females.”

Fighting Hamas in Gaza is a problem because Hamas is fighting underground:

The current Israeli estimates range from 350 to about 500 miles of tunnels. The tunnel network, according to Israel, is where Hamas lives, holds hostages, stores weapons, builds missiles and moves from place to place. By some Israeli estimates, building these tunnels cost the Gazan people about a billion dollars, which could have gone to building schools and starting companies.

Hamas built many of its most important military and strategic facilities under hospitals, schools and so on. Its server farm, for example, was built under the offices of the U.N. relief agency in Gaza City, according to the Israeli military.

What is the Hamas strategy? Quite simple, Brooks explains:

Hamas’s goal is to maximize the number of Palestinians who die and in that way build international pressure until Israel is forced to end the war before Hamas is wiped out. Hamas’s survival depends on support in the court of international opinion and on making this war as bloody as possible for civilians, until Israel relents.

As it happens, using civilians as human shields is a war crime, but no one, from the Biden administration on down, seems to care.

Now, for its part Israel has avoided civilian casualties:

John Spencer, … the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point … told me that Israel has done far more to protect civilians than the United States did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Spencer reports that Israel has warned civilians when and where it is about to begin operations and published an online map showing which areas to leave. It has sent out millions of pamphlets, texts and recorded calls warning civilians of coming operations. It has conducted four-hour daily pauses to allow civilians to leave combat areas. It has dropped speakers that blast out instructions about when to leave and where to go. These measures, Spencer told me, have telegraphed where the I.D.F. is going to move next and “have prolonged the war, to be honest.”

Rather than offer up the body counts provided by Hamas, Brooks begins with the question of how well the Israeli strategy is working.

What do we make of the current Israeli strategy? Judged purely on a tactical level, there’s a strong argument that the I.D.F. has been remarkably effective against Hamas forces. I’ve learned to be suspicious of precise numbers tossed about in this war, but the I.D.F. claims to have killed over 13,000 of the roughly 30,000 Hamas troops. It has disrupted three-quarters of Hamas’s battalions so that they are no longer effective fighting units. It has also killed two of five brigade commanders and 19 of 24 battalion commanders. As of January, U.S. officials estimated that Israel had damaged or made inoperable 20 to 40 percent of the tunnels. Many Israelis believe the aggressive onslaught has begun to restore Israel’s deterrent power. 

And yet, the fly in the ointment is what Brooks calls world public opinion. He does not quite say it but the Biden administration has given the green light to those who want to criticize Israel. It has made criticizing Israel acceptable.

Global public opinion is moving decisively against Israel. The key shift is in Washington. Historically pro-Israeli Democrats like Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer are now pounding the current Israeli government with criticism. Biden wants Israel to call off its invasion of the final Hamas strongholds in the south. Israel is now risking a rupture with its closest ally and its only reliable friend on the U.N. Security Council. If Israel is going to defend itself from Iran, it needs strong alliances, and Israel is steadily losing those friends.

Then, Brooks offers the opinion trafficked by the Biden administration through its satrap, New York Times columnist Tommy Friedman. Namely, that Israel must have a plan for Gaza after the war.

The key weakness of the Israeli strategy has always been that it is aimed at defeating Hamas militarily without addressing Palestinian grievances and without paying enough attention to the wider consequences. As the leaders of Hamas watch Washington grow more critical of Jerusalem, they must know their strategy is working.

As noted here in previous posts, it would certainly be a positive step if the Palestinian Authority would step up and offer a plan of its own. If self-determination is the goal of the Palestinian people, they should tell the world how they are going to govern themselves after the war.

If they fail to do so, this tells us that they have no interest in self-determination or even in the well being of their people. Their goal is to establish one state, from the river to the sea, a state and is free of Jews.

After outlining the different proposals, Brooks arrives at the Biden administration position. Which is, for the Israelis to stop now, to quit, leaving the remnants of Hamas in place.

A fourth alternative is that Israel should just stop. It should settle for what it has achieved and not finish the job by invading Rafah and the southern areas of Gaza, or it should send in just small strike teams.

David Brooks rejects the proposal. He explains that Hamas must be defeated. To coin an old phrase: Hamas delenda est.

This is now the official Biden position. The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has argued that Israel can destroy Hamas in Gaza without a large invasion but “by other means” (which he did not elaborate on). The United States has asked Israel to send a delegation to Washington to discuss alternative Rafah strategies, which is good. 

The problem is that, first, there seems to be a budding disagreement over how much of Hamas needs to be destroyed to declare victory and, second, the I.D.F. estimates that there are 5,000 to 8,000 Hamas fighters in Rafah. Defeating an army that size would take thousands of airstrikes and raids. If you try to shrink the incursion, the math just doesn’t add up. As an Israeli war cabinet member, Benny Gantz, reportedly told U.S. officials, “Finishing the war without demilitarizing Rafah is like sending in firefighters to put out 80 percent of a fire.”

This is the coward’s way out, and it is about what we would expect from the Biden crowd.

If Hamas survives this war intact, it would be harder for the global community to invest in rebuilding Gaza. It would be impossible to begin a peace process. As the veteran Middle East observers Robert Satloff and Dennis Ross wrote in American Purpose, “Any talk of a postwar political process is meaningless without Israel battlefield success: There can be no serious discussion of a two-state solution or any other political objective with Hamas either still governing Gaza or commanding a coherent military force.”

Basically, Brooks is correct… until he gets to saying that Israel is responsible for the Palestinian future. Yet, why does he not consider that the Gazans could surrender and give up their hostages-- tomorrow. They would forestall the attack on Rafah and set about rebuilding.

On this last point I respectfully demur:

Israel also has to offer the world a vision for Gaza’s recovery, and it has to do it right now. Ross argues that after the war is over, the core logic of the peace has to be demilitarization in exchange for reconstruction. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, he sketches out a comprehensive rebuilding effort, bringing in nations and agencies from all over the world, so Gaza doesn’t become a failed state or remain under Hamas control.

The Palestinian Authority should make a diplomatic overture and present a plan for the Hamas-free Gaza. It does not do so because the Palestinian people do not want a two-state solution. They want to kill more Jews.

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Losing Face

Two days ago I reported on some new research about depression. The studies purported to show that depression, in many but not all cases, is signaling that something is wrong. It is telling you to set things right.

In the post I noted that depression signals a social dislocation, a disconnection from other human beings, and that it should be resolved by reconnecting and establishing fruitful contacts.

Most everyone agrees that there is too much depression around. The promise of Prozac has not been borne out.

One understands that the currently fashionable explanation of this problem blames social media and gadgets. Children, especially, spend so much time on their gadgets that they have lost the habit of getting along with other children.

Among its proponents are NYU professor Jonathan Haidt and UC San Diego professor Jean Twenge. I refer to Judith Warner’s counterpoint in her review of Haidt’s new book. She argues that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Warner is not persuaded that Haidt has overcome this objection.

So, allow me a different thesis. Consider the analysis offered by famed Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam. You know him because you know his book, Bowling Alone.

Now, Putnam did a study of multicultural communities, where people of different ethnic backgrounds live in the same neighborhoods. The study is called E Pluribus Unum. The analysis might apply to schools where the bureaucratic grandees believe that there is a special value in mixing children from different cultures.

Putnam discovered that the people who live in such diverse communities tend to hunker down, tend not to get along, tend to avoid each other. Hmmm. Perhaps that is why we suffer from a generalized sense of disconnection.

If people are going to connect they must be playing the same game according to one set of rules. If there are multiple sets of rules you never know which is which, who you might or might not be offending. Ergo, you will withdraw, perhaps into a club where everyone speaks the same language and observes the same customs. 

Add to that the chance that different people have been admitted to a group according to different standards, thanks to affirmative action policies or diversity quotas. When different states declare that aspiring attorneys no longer have to take the bar exam, it is creating two classes of lawyers. The chances of them getting along are diminished.

And of course if different people have different pronouns, different forms of illiterate expression, you are most likely to hunker down, because it is not worth the trouble to remember each person’s different pronouns. It is easier to retreat and withdraw into social media where the risk is lesser.

In other words, social disconnection is built into the current mania about multiculturalism. And if social disconnection is built in, so is depression.

None of this should come as a surprise. As we have noted, the psycho world does not care about social connection. In the most flagrant sense, it tells people, over and over again, not to care about how you look to other people. You should care, it says, about how you feel about yourself.

It’s a formula for social disconnection, for ignoring other people and for not caring about looking good to others. Looking good to others is a moral category. It might include your appearance, whether you follow the dress code and practice good grooming, but it refers primarily to your moral character. And that means whether you are trustworthy, loyal, reliable and decent. That is, whether you are a credit to your community.

So, therapy culture has undermined your ability to get along with other people because it told you to forget about your reputation, about how you look to other people. It is a decisive error.

When you are considered primarily to be a social being, what matters is less your psyche and more your face. That means, you face in both the literal and figurative senses. Dare I make the most obvious observation, namely, that you never see your face directly. You can see its reflected image. You can judge how other people react to you, but you cannot look yourself in the eye.

I have written extensively about face, in my books Saving Face and, The Last Psychoanalyst. See also Tasha Eurich’s book, Insight.

So if you are more worried about what you can get away with than about doing the right thing in order to have a good reputation you have bought the therapy culture.

Within this context depression is redefined as-- losing face. Curing depression involves saving face. Simple and easy, don’t you think?

To make matters slightly less easy, I am obliged to inform you that in Asian cultures there are two forms of face. You lose face when you cease to be a member in good standing of a community. But you also lose face when you lose status and prestige within the community.

If you care to complicate the issue, I would add that you can lose face for belonging to a family where one member has disgraced himself. Losing your good name is like losing face.

One reason we are motivated to do the right thing and to maintain a good reputation is that we share our good name with other family members, even with members of our community. And, at times, we are depressed because we belong to a community whose leaders have embarrassed themselves.

As for the question of cure, consider it this way. If you failed at a task, the cure is success. If you get caught with your pants down, the cure is to pull them up. If you have bad manners, the cure is good manners. If a member of your family has been identified as a scoundrel, you will either need to disassociate yourself from him or persuade him to change his deviant ways. 

But then, if someone disrespects you, insults you, offends you… this causes a loss of face. It requires a response, one that will save face. He is obliged to demonstrate, by his actions, that he is not defined by the demeaning insult.

If people disrespect you, you need to respond by acting like someone who respects himself. 

Rarely do our psycho therapists recognize that the problem here lies with what the philosophers call other minds. Changing behavior must be consistent. Getting it right once does not count. You need to change the minds of other people, to change the way that they see you. 

Among the things you do not do is-- trying to figure out why you failed or why you have bad table manners. Blaming it in your mother does not improve performance and does not teach you good manners.

The same problem exists when you have been traumatized. You will note that the new group of trauma doctors, the ones who recovered and repackaged the Victorian notion of conversion hysteria, do not acknowledge that it’s one thing to remember what happened and quite another to erase it from the minds of other people.

If you have forgotten the trauma, and other people know about it, they might look at you with pity. To disassociate yourself from a trauma you will need to erase it from the minds of other people. This tells us that sharing the information with lots of other people is a losing strategy.

I am happy to inform you that I have some free consulting hours in my coaching practice. If you are interested, email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

Saturday Miscellany

First, led by Chuck Schumer, Senate Democrats are becoming the anti-Israel party. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress. As you recall, the last time Netanyahu did the same in 2015 many members of the Democratic Party boycotted the event.

Now, after Netanyahu addressed the Senate Republican Caucus via Videolink last Wednesday, Chuck Schumer rejected a request to address the Democratic caucus:

US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declined a request by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to the Senate Democratic Caucus, Punchbowl News reported on Wednesday.

Punchbowl reported that Schumer said these conversations should not happen "in a partisan manner."

Obviously, this is incoherent. The Democrats are afraid of losing votes in Michigan and Minnesota.

Second, if you like poll results, if you thrill to the notion of a two-state solution in the Middle East, and if you believe that the people of Gaza and the West Bank want nothing more than self-determination, you will be disabused of your naivete by this report, from the National Review. It comes from Zach Kessel :

Seventy-one percent of Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank believe Hamas made the right decision in attacking Israel on October 7, according to a new poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, an organization primarily funded by the European Union and the United States-based Ford Foundation.

The percentage of West Bank residents who support the Hamas attack has decreased slightly since December, when 82 percent of West Bank respondents said they agreed with the decision, though support for the terror attack has increased in Gaza, rising from 57 percent in December to 71 percent in March.

Ninety-one percent of Palestinians, according to the survey, do not think Hamas has committed war crimes, and 93 percent say the terrorist organization did not commit the well documented acts of rape and civilian slaughter that took place on October 7.

When asked who should control the Gaza Strip after the current war ends, 64 percent of respondents in the West Bank and 52 percent in Gaza said Hamas should rule the territory, whereas 13 percent chose the Palestinian Authority without president Mahmoud Abbas and 11 percent selected the PA with Abbas. Another 64 percent of respondents said they believe Hamas will defeat Israel by the time the war is over.

Seventy-five percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and 62 percent in Gaza say they are satisfied with Hamas’s role; support for Hamas within the West Bank has dropped by 10 points over the past three months, though it has risen by ten points in Gaza over the same period of time.

When asked about “the best means of achieving Palestinian goals in ending the occupation and building an independent state,” a plurality of Palestinians — 39 percent in Gaza and 46 percent in the West Bank — believe “armed struggle” to be the ideal option. To that end, a slight minority of Palestinians believe in the idea of a two-state solution and only 38 percent support negotiations to achieve such a goal.

As we have suggested in these pages, Tommy Friedman and Antony Blinken are basically blowing smoke. 

Third, why do the Palestinians continue to want more of the same? Why do they believe that they are winning? Why do they continue, surrounded by the rubble of what used to be Gaza, to believe that the October 7 massacre was a rousing success?

Simply put, consider the support they are receiving around the world. And consider how many people have forgotten October 7 and have directed their ire at Israel.

The Palestinians believe that they are winning the propaganda war. Heck, even Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer are on their side.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized this morning:

Mr. Biden’s public criticism and distancing from Israel signals to other nations that they can go even further and the U.S. likely won’t oppose it. Will he condemn Canada’s grandstanding decision this week to stop selling arms to Israel? Crickets from the White House so far. The President’s fading support for Israel is a message to all American allies that the U.S. can’t be trusted if their cause runs afoul of the Democratic Party’s left wing.

Fourth, South Africa is running out of water and electricity. The story, from CBS News, involves Johannesburg, but it brings to mind the water crisis suffered by Capetown several years ago.

For two weeks, Tsholofelo Moloi has been among thousands of South Africans lining up for water as the country's largest city, Johannesburg, confronts an unprecedented collapse of its water system affecting millions of people.

Residents rich and poor have never seen a shortage of this severity. While hot weather has shrunk reservoirs, crumbling infrastructure after decades of neglect is also largely to blame. 

The public's frustration is a danger sign for the ruling African National Congress, whose comfortable hold on power since the end of apartheid in the 1990s faces its most serious challenge in an election this year.

A country already famous for its hourslong electricity shortages is now adopting a term called "watershedding" — the practice of going without water, from the term loadshedding, or the practice of going without power.

Moloi, a resident of Soweto on the outskirts of Johannesburg, isn't sure she or her neighbors can take much more.

I wrote about the Capetown water crisis on February 6, 1918. I recall from that post that the city government considered the possibility of building a desalination plant.

But then they discovered that the best plants were being built by Israeli companies, so they rejected that solution. Now South Africa is leading the world in trying to indict Israel for war crimes and genocide.

Fifth, on a lighter note, our mentally disabled president did it again. He offered up yet another word salad:

If we drove out to the airport and put you on Air Force One and you had a prescription you needed to fill, and it was an American company that made it, I’d say, ‘Ok. Let’s fly to Toronto or Berlin or to London or to Rome or any other major city in America.

Sixth, a confused high school girl shot and killed her mother and injured her father. The girl from Mississippi is named Carly Madison Grigg. She thinks that she is a boy. 

Wesley Yang comments on the tragic story:

We are encouraging all alienated, troubled, mentally disturbed young people to identify into a made up identity category that comes with a lurid, hyperbolic narrative of oppression and an online community rife with cheerleading for suicide and violence

Seventh, the other day I was saying that it is difficult to assess the practical consequences of affirmative action programs. How much damage do underqualified physicians-- to take an example-- do on the job. 

Happily, or, not so happily, Ann Coulter offers some examples in her Thursday  column. She begins with the case of Dr. Patrick Chavis, the man who took the place that ought to have been given to Dr. Allan Bakke. You will recall that Dr. Bakke gave his name to a Supreme Court decision favoring affirmative action:

…. it already has happened, countless times, all over the country — but notoriously, to the most famous affirmative action doctor of all: the black applicant who took Allan Bakke’s place at the medical school of the University of California at Davis. Here was an incompetent black doctor whose medical errors couldn’t be brushed under the rug, though affirmative action proponents did their best.

Dr. Patrick Chavis openly admitted that he never would have gotten into medical school without UC Davis’ affirmative action program. Sen. Teddy Kennedy, The New York Times and the Nation magazine all touted Chavis as an affirmative action success story! Unlike Bakke, who went to work at the Mayo Clinic, Chavis was serving a disadvantaged community and “making a difference in the lives of scores of poor families,” as Sen. Kennedy said.

Yes, he was making a difference in his patients’ lives, mostly by shortening them. Dr. Chavis’ liposuction surgery left one patient bleeding, vomiting and urinating uncontrollably. But instead of taking her to a hospital, he let her bleed in his home for another 40 hours. By the time she managed to escape and check herself into a hospital, she’d lost 70% of her blood. (To be fair, she looked amazing when bikini season rolled around!)

Miraculously, she lived, as did most of his other liposuction patients who ended up in the emergency room. One, Tammaria Cotton, did not.

But the affirmative action cover-up can never end: It took the California medical board a year to suspend Dr. Chavis’ license, with patient advocates screaming bloody murder at such a pathetically slow response.

Hmmm.

For more horror stories, check out Ann’s column.

Eighth, on the transmania front, a company called Planet Fitness has defended a trans woman, allowing him to undress in the women’s locker room. A woman who protested the intrusion had her membership revoked. As a result, the market value of the stock has declined precipitously. 

CBS News reports:

Planet Fitness' valuation has plummeted $400 million in five days after they banned a member who shared a photo of a 'trans woman' using a female locker room. 

The company's value dropped from $5.3 billion on March 14 to $4.9 billion on March 19, and its shares are down by 13.59 percent compared to a month ago.

The decline follows Planet Fitness refusing to walk back its decision to ban a member who exposed a 'trans woman' shaving in a female locker room earlier this month. 

Patricia Silva was barred after she detailed an incident at her Alaska gym online, where she said she saw a transgender woman in her locker room.

Following backlash against the ban, the company said although some members may feel uncomfortable sharing facilities, 'this discomfort is not a reason to deny access to the transgender member.'

Apparently, the Bud Light fiasco did not teach them anything. 

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How to Treat Depression

The new research presents itself as an adjunct to the current ways to treat depression. It does not tell us very much about the current ways, which sometimes involve medication but more often consider depression to be a disease, a chemical imbalance or a disturbance of the soul. 

Aside from the use of medication, about which I have no competence, current practice sees depression as an inner mental disturbance. It promotes certain kinds of psychological treatments, from cognitive exercises to introspection.

I have some confidence in cognitive therapy, but still, the nation is awash in depression. Young people, in particular, are depressed and anxious at levels we have rarely seen. As Abigail Shrier argues in her new book, Bad Therapy, it appears that the therapy industrial complex has gotten something grievously wrong.

And we should acknowledge, from the onset, that there are different kinds of depression. Some respond only to medication; some do not.

Anyway, the new study suggests that we can improve treatment if we consider depression as a signal, trying to tell the patient something. The researchers call it framing. I have no idea why they choose the concept of framing, which makes no real sense, but I heartily approve of the notion that depression is trying to tell us something. 

Such thinking echoes the approach to anxiety and fear. It assumes that anxiety is trying to tell us something, specifically, that we are under some level of threat and that we ought to do something to mitigate the danger.

Note that all of it rejects the old Freudian notion that people who are suffering anxiety have nothing to feel anxious about, and therefore are reliving unprocessed castration anxiety.

Such thinking makes depression a psychic phenomenon, to be dealt with through introspection and analysis, that is, by putting it in a narrative. 

Some modern theories emphasize that depression is a chemical imbalance. This relieves you of any sense that you have done anything to feel depressed, but it also tells you that you cannot do anything to resolve it.

Eric Dolan summarizes the new research at PsyPost:

Traditionally, depression has been viewed through a disease-based lens, attributed to genetic, biological, or chemical imbalances. This biogenetic explanation, while reducing self-blame, has also led to unintended negative consequences like increased stigma and reduced hope for recovery.

The researchers proposed a new way of looking at depression: as a signal indicating that something in one’s life needs more attention. This approach draws from evolutionary psychiatry and suggests that, like fear or sadness, depression could have an adaptive function.

Dolan quotes Hans S. Schroder, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School.

“So we’re testing out different explanations of depression beyond this disease-centered framework. I’ve been interested in the idea that depression actually has a purpose in one’s life – that it’s trying to tell you something isn’t working for you right now and you can get curious about your life in order to address the depression.”

And also,

This finding suggests that viewing depression as a functional signal, rather than a disease, could help alleviate some of the negative self-perceptions associated with mental health issues.

Rather than see yourself as suffering from a disease, this approach says that depression is telling you to repair your relationships, to reconnect with other people. 

The PsyPost report does not show us what to do, but  if depression involves feeling detached, forlorn and bereft, you do well to learn how to repair and to conduct relationships. And not just love relationships.

Given that therapy has not seen depression as a signal, it has not offered any theorizing or any practicum about how to reconstruct relationships. For that reason I am writing a book about how to get along with other people and why you should get along with other people. 

Obviously, this should begin with the establishment of a constructive relationship with a counselor. If you are depressed and if you do not connect with your counselor, you will have little chance of resolving your depression.

Second, I emphasize specificity. If you are going to reconnect with society you will need to be able to distinguish different types of relationships with different people. Do not imagine that they all reduce to a narrative about love and aggression.

Far too many depressed people imagine that they are going to overcome their condition by falling in love. They are grievously wrong. 

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